Two tribes in tiff over Tilka Manjhi's legacy

TNN | Feb 13, 2014, 12.11 PM IST

DUMKA: Two tribes of the state - Santhals and Paharias -- are in a tussle over freedom fighter Tilka Manjhi lineage. Manjhi is known as the first tribal leader to take up arms against the British in the 1789, many decades before Mangal Pandey. He organized the Santhals to form the Mukti Dal (liberation group) to fight against the exploitation by the Britishers.
Though Manjhi has widely been accepted as a Santhal tribal, Paharias, a primitive tribe belonging to Santhal Pargana, have for the last few years been claiming that he was a Jaura Paharia or Jabra Paharia.

A couple of years ago, the move district administration launched a project to determine the ethnicity of Tilka Manjhi, but they are yet to arrive on any conclusion. However, the Paharia community continues to pay tributes to him him on his birth and death anniversaries. Members of the Paharia Mukti Sena (PMS) on Tuesday organized a massive rally to commemorate the martyrdom of Tilka Manjhi in Dumka and garlanded his statue near Gandhi Maidan.

PMS' secretary Gayaal Dehri said it was due to well planned conspiracy that Tilka Manjhi was branded a Santhal although he could not be linked to Santhal Pargana when he was hanged by the British Government for assassinating Bhagalpur collector Augustus Cleveland in 1785.

The controversy started when an inscription at the site of his statue in Dumka mentioned he was a Santhal. The move infuriated Paharias. The administration approached the Ranchi-based Tribal Research Unstitute to trace the tribal hero's orgin, but no substantive outcome has so far been reported.

Former assistant director of TRI Soma Singh Munda declined to reveal the findings of the research, but admitted that Santhals arrived in this region long after the martyrdom of Tilka Manjhi. "Whatsoever be the case, a freedom fighters' ethnicity must not be mentioned anywhere on their statues or, for that matter, it must not emerge as a bone of contention between different communities" Munda opined.

A case was also lodged in a Dumka court earlier by the PMS against the writer-publisher of a book that had mentioned Tilka Manjhi as a Santhal. The book was later withdrawn after they admitted their mistake.